What Is "Functional Gwas"?

Question

[pmoney1]

Can anyone explain the exact definition of this? I think it might be GWAS on longitudinal (i.e. timecourse) traits, but the definition seems a bit muddled to me.

Answer 1

[Gjain]

Hi,

These resources might help you understand functional GWAS:

• A dynamic model for genome-wide association studies

  Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are widely used to identify the genetic and environmental etiology of a trait, several key issues related to their statistical power and biological relevance have remained unexplored. Here, we describe a novel statistical approach, called functional GWAS or fGWAS, to analyze the genetic control of traits by integrating biological principles of trait formation into the GWAS framework through mathematical and statistical bridges. fGWAS can address many fundamental questions, such as the patterns of genetic control over development, the duration of genetic effects, as well as what causes developmental trajectories to change or stop changing. In statistics, fGWAS displays increased power for gene detection by capitalizing on cumulative phenotypic variation in a longitudinal trait over time and increased robustness for manipulating sparse longitudinal data.

• On beyond GWAS (Nature Genetics)

• Impact of functional information on understanding variation

• Progress and Promise of Genome-Wide Association Studies for Human Complex Trait Genetics

  Through integration with annotations and functional genomic data as well as by in vitro and in vivo experimentation, mapping studies continue to characterize functional variants associated with complex traits and address fundamental issues such as epistasis and pleiotropy. This review focuses primarily on the ways in which genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have revolutionized the field of human quantitative genetics.

• Genome-wide association studies: potential next steps on a genetic journey

  Genome-wide association studies have successfully identified numerous loci at which common variants influence disease risk or quantitative traits. Despite these successes, the variants identified by these studies have generally explained only a small fraction of the heritable component of disease risk, and have not pinpointed with certainty the causal variant(s) at the associated loci. Furthermore, the mechanisms of action by which associated loci influence disease or quantitative phenotypes are often unclear, because we do not know through which gene(s) the associated variants exert their effects or because these gene(s) are of unknown function or have no clear connection to known disease biology. Thus, the initial set of genome-wide association studies serve as a starting point for future genetic and functional studies.

• This fig shows some of the functional information (Source)

I hope this helps